Food
A sustainability topic that did gather my attention throughout my studies was food. Learning about how food chains were constructed but more importantly to understand what food is deemed 'sustainable' and what can be done to limit the carbon footprint of an individual is an area that does intrigue me. It led me to do steer several assignments into understanding these different aspects of this large and broad sustainability issue.
Analysing Governance practices
The first large assignment was under the course Analysing Governance Practices. In this course the task was to analyse a governance practice that went against the current regime and standards. Here my group investigated the case of Herenboeren. Herenboeren is an organisation that aims to create a direct food chain from farmer to consumer through creating small communities in which the farmer is employed for that community. The farmer therefore does not need to sell its products, but is rather payed for their service, and additionally the community is closely involved in the process. The analysis highlighted different issues that hamper the development of such innovative processes and solutions, which was really insightful.
Sustainable food systems
One of my final courses was Sustainable Food Systems. In this course the goal was to first understand the different aspects of a certain product or service in its social, economic, and energy subsystems by using causal loop diagrams. Then after identifying two important variables, to create different scenarios where these variables differ, to finally select one and create a transformation pathway to this scenario. Here I investigated tomato production within the Netherlands, including interviews with several farmers. This was extremely interesting as it became clear that at least the farmers that I talked to were actually interested and willing to implement and invest in more sustainable solutions, however due to larger scale issues such as supermarket dominance were limited in the execution of these ideas.
